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1962-ferrari-250-gto
Two weeks ago, Nyetimber vineyard owner and entrepreneur Eric Heerema made the sale of a lifetime. Heerema, a Dutch-born business mogul now living in southern England, sold his 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO to Craig McCaw, a US-based car collector, for the reported sum of $35,000,000.
McCaw certainly had the cash, selling McCaw Cellular to AT&T in 1993 for a whopping $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.
This is just the latest in a string of high-dollar Ferrari sales that have taken place in 2012, but little is known about the other multimillion-dollar Fezzas that have changed hands in the past few years.
In the collector car realm, there are two markets: the auction world, where bidding takes place in public forums and the sale amounts are disclosed by the auction house, and then there's the other market, where collectors conspire to sell their hyper-exotic wares to each other, rarely releasing the amounts.
Tracking down exact prices in this underground world is next to impossible, as neither the buyers nor the sellers are inclined to disclose what they paid for the latest addition to their collections. Further, collectors don't even want to be identified for a range of insurance and security reasons.
So how do we know that this particular GTO is the most expensive Ferrari in the world?
We don't. But based on a smattering of reports and our own digging, the now McCaw-owned 250 GTO stands to be the king of the hill when it comes to not just Ferraris, but all other classic car purchases, toppling the 1936 Type 57SC Bugatti Atlantic owned by famed Southern California car collector Peter Mullin and purchased for between $32,000,000 and $34,000,000 in 2010.
So what other Ferraris are fetching tens of millions of dollars on the collector market? We'll start with McCaw's and go from there.
